Do Your Movie Preferences Influence the Games You Enjoy?
Ask someone what their favourite film says about them and they’ll usually have an answer ready. The quiet friend picks something slow and strange, the loud one picks a heist, and most people assume the same instincts carry over to whatever they play once the credits roll.
The research behind that theory is a lot messier, and the place it comes apart is the difference between the suspense a film builds and the wait a game makes you sit through.
Quiet Viewers, Loud Films
There is some evidence for the stereotype. A 2013 study by researchers in Madrid and Amsterdam matched personality scores to the film likes of more than 53,000 Facebook users. Higher extraversion went with drama, romance, comedy and action, and lower scores with animation, tragedy, neo-noir and science fiction.
The usual explanation goes back to Hans Eysenck, who argued in the 1960s that introverts run at a higher resting level of arousal and so look for less stimulation, not more. A 1980 study that tested the theory with caffeine and different times of day predicted that extraverts “should be stimulation seekers and introverts stimulation avoiders.” It has been tested for decades with mixed results, but it’s why people expect an introvert to want a quieter evening.
If those instincts carried over to games, suspense would be the easiest place to see it. Someone who loves a slow-burn thriller is happy to sit with an unanswered question for two hours, so you’d expect them to enjoy roulette too, a game that is mostly a wait for the ball to settle.
In roulette, you pick a number, a colour or a group of numbers before the wheel spins, and the bet pays if the ball stops on your pick. Whether at a physical table or in online casino roulette games, the dynamic is identical: once the wheel turns, player agency drops to zero. That leaves both the thriller fan and the player waiting passively for an outcome – yet the two experiences feel entirely different.
How a Thriller Holds You
Alfred Hitchcock explained it to François Truffaut with a bomb. Two people chat at a table and the bomb underneath goes off, which gives the audience “fifteen seconds of surprise.” Show the audience the bomb first, tell them it goes off at one o’clock, and the same dull conversation becomes “fifteen minutes of suspense.”
Some good thrillers do the opposite. Conclave, which we called “a riveting thriller that grabs our attention and never lets it go,” keeps its secrets as close as the cardinals do, and the pleasure is working them out alongside Ralph Fiennes. Black Bag does something similar with a dinner table full of spies.
The philosopher Noël Carroll argued that “suspense cannot be engendered simply by means of uncertainty.” You have to care about one outcome and fear it’s the less likely one. He also had an answer for why people who know exactly how Psycho ends still tense up in the motel office: it’s enough to imagine, for the length of the scene, that the outcome is open.
Waiting on a Wheel
A spin works without any of that. At a roulette table every player knows as much as everyone else, and the result isn’t arranged for effect. In Hitchcock’s terms it’s all surprise and no suspense, and it’s over in seconds. There is also the money. A film costs the price of the ticket however it ends. A bet can lose everything that’s riding on it, and roulette, like other casino games, is built to pay back less than it takes over time.
Taste Isn’t a Personality Test
The more careful studies make the personality-predicts-taste idea look shakier still. In 2011, Peter Rentfrow and colleagues asked more than 3,000 people to rate 108 entertainment genres and found five broad clusters of taste, which they labelled communal, aesthetic, dark and cerebral, plus a fifth built around action, adventure and suspense. In their online sample, personality helped predict four of them. The action-and-suspense cluster was the exception: once the researchers knew someone’s age, gender and education, adding personality told them very little more. The researchers were candid about another limit: “all the data analyzed were based on self-reports.”
Horror points to a different trait altogether. A study published in 1987, which surveyed people leaving a Halloween II screening, pointed to sensation seeking, youth and being male as the things that predicted enjoyment.
What You Pick on a Given Night
The theory that holds up best is also the least romantic. Dolf Zillmann’s mood management research suggests people choose entertainment to adjust how they feel at the time: something calming after a frantic day, something gripping when they’re bored. A 2003 paper testing the idea summed up its premise as “self-exposure to media fare is motivated by hedonic purposes,” which is a formal way of saying people pick what they think will make them feel better. The same person might want a slow mystery on Sunday and a co-op video game with friends on Friday. Even the same film lands differently watched alone on a laptop or in a packed cinema on opening night.
